FINDHR is an interdisciplinary project that seeks to prevent, detect, and mitigate discrimination in AI. Our research will be contextualized within the technical, legal, and ethical problems of algorithmic hiring and the domain of human resources, but will also show how to manage discrimination risks in a broad class of applications involving human recommendation. Through a context-sensitive, interdisciplinary approach, we will develop new technologies to measure discrimination risks, to create fairness-aware rankings and interventions, and to provide multi-stakeholder actionable interpretability. We will produce new technical guidance to perform impact assessment and algorithmic auditing, a protocol for equality monitoring, and a guide for fairness-aware AI software development. We will also design and deliver specialized skills training for developers and auditors of AI systems. We ground our project in EU regulation and policy. As tackling discrimination risks in AI requires processing sensitive data, we will perform a targeted legal analysis of tensions between data protection regulation (including the GDPR) and anti-discrimination regulation in Europe. We will engage with underrepresented groups through multiple mechanisms including consultation with experts and participatory action research. In our research, technology, law, and ethics are interwoven. The consortium includes leaders in algorithmic fairness and explainability research (UPF, UVA, UNIPI, MPI-SP), pioneers in the auditing of digital services (AW, ETICAS), and two industry partners that are leaders in their respective markets (ADE, RAND), complemented by experts in technology regulation (RU) and cross-cultural digital ethics (EUR), as well as worker representatives (ETUC) and two NGOs dedicated to fighting discrimination against women (WIDE+) and vulnerable populations (PRAK). All outputs will be released as open access publications, open source software, open datasets, and open courseware.

ENLIGHTEN responds to the first part of the EURO-4 call on “The future of European integration - 'More Europe – less Europe?'” by bringing together an interdisciplinary ‘next generation’ research team that integrates insights from Comparative Political Economy, European Studies, International Political Economy, and Sociology. ENLIGHTEN answers the call by focusing on how European modes of governance respond to ‘fast-burning’ and ‘slow-burning’ crises. These types of crises differ in how they affect the legitimacy of European input, output, and throughput processes in established and emergent modes of governance. In fast-burning crises interests are quickly formed and ideational and resource battles ensue over how to coordinate policy ideas, what institutions should be engaged, and communicating these changes to the public. Networks in fast crises are composed of defined groups seeking to protect or carve out their interests. In slow-burning crises interests are less obvious and the key task is often how to define the issues involved and who should address the problem. Here networks are commonly composed of experts who battle over how issues should be defined, as well as the boundaries on how coordinative and communicative discourses are articulated. Both fast- and slow-burning crises must be addressed by European modes of governance, with serious implications for the legitimacy and efficiency of the European project. Both raise political, social, and economic sensitivities that are transforming democratic politics in Europe. ENLIGHTEN addresses these themes through a series of linked cases that speak directly to the legitimacy and efficiency of European modes of governance.

The project investigates the living and working conditions of irregularised migrant households in Europe from an intersectional perspective. It aims to reveal the spectrum of irregularity in contemporary Europe and cast light on the everyday experiences of migrants with irregular, unstable and/or precarious legal status. I-CLAIM develops the concept of ‘irregularity assemblages’ to capture how migrants’ ‘irregular condition’ is produced by the interplay of immigration and asylum laws, policies and practice, wider labour market and welfare regimes, and political, media and public narratives. The irregular condition is shaped by migrants’ social position and positionality as well as by processes that occur at international, European, regional and local levels. This approach will inform our theoretical understanding, methodology and analytical framework and how the consortium organises its work. Moreover, it enables us to design, assess and validate detailed policy options and public interventions targeted at place-specific, sectoral, and intersectional criticalities and vulnerabilities experienced by a range of people in irregular situations in Europe. To achieve its overarching ambition, we will engage at all stages of the project cycle with relevant European, national, local and sectoral actors in six countries (Finland, Germany, Italy, The Netherland, Poland and the UK) through Country Stakeholder Groups (CSG) and a European Stakeholder Group (EISG). Moreover, we will organise a series of consultative and participatory initiatives to produce new knowledge, inform public and political debate, validate key research findings, and design policy recommendations.